How does film director Michael Winterbottom coax such superb performances from
Steve Coogan? With 'The Look of Love’ about to open, Tim Robey
explains all.

This is shaping up to be quite the year for Steve Coogan. His long-awaited Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa, is scheduled for release in August. First, though, we have The Look of Love, in which Coogan stars as Soho porn king Paul Raymond, anchoring a warts-and-all peek into the British sex industry.

Out this week, the film is notable as the fourth collaboration between Coogan and his director, Michael Winterbottom. Slowly but surely, this is turning into one of the more valuable creative partnerships in recent British film. You could compare the frequency with which Hugh Grant has worked with screenwriter Richard Curtis, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Notting Hill, the Bridget Jones films and Love Actually. Or there’s the Peter Morgan and Michael Sheen team — Sheen played Tony Blair from Morgan’s scripts for both The Deal and The Queen, then David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Brian Clough in The Damned United.

With Coogan and Winterbottom, it seems to be a more casual, not to say quixotic arrangement: in the years since they first worked together, on 24 Hour Party People in 2002, both men have made plenty of films apart.

Winterbottom may be the most restlessly prolific British director alive: he’s made an impressive 14 films since the millennium, and one TV series, ranging from political dramas (A Mighty Heart) to futuristic love stories (Code 46) and period neo-noir (The Killer Inside Me). Coogan, meanwhile, has become a favoured supporting player in Hollywood studio comedies, from Night at the Museum to Tropic Thunder and The Other Guys.

Still, the failure of Hamlet 2 in 2008 — an Andrew Fleming-directed theatre farce that bypassed a theatrical release in Britain — underlined a sticking point in Coogan’s film career, which is that he’s only tended to flourish in leading roles with Winterbottom at the helm. Winterbottom knows how to use the actor in a way other directors seemingly don’t — as a self-conscious prat of a protagonist, real and tragicomic enough to give us more than just sideshow cameos.

True, this is slightly brushing over Coogan’s very first foray into features, John Duigan’s all-but-forgotten The Parole Officer (2001), which made money at the time despite very middling reviews. But 24 Hour Party People showed a much more ingenious way to harness that Partridgian voice — pompous, over-educated, instantly self-deflating — and use it to dictate the whole tone and ambition of a movie.

As Tony Wilson, the Granada TV presenter and founder of Factory Records, Coogan was handed the movie on a plate by its screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce — no one else could imaginably have played the part. Listen to the writing: “Shaun Ryder’s lyrics on a good day are on a par with WB Yeats on an average day.” It was a gift of a role for Coogan’s particular brand of nasal bathos. In the busy ensemble Winterbottom assembled to embody the legends of the Manchester music scene, it was Coogan who got to step in, regularly, and yank the whole movie off-track in new directions. “I’m being post-modern,” he would explain in the voiceover. “Before it was fashionable.”

It’s hard to get much more post-modern than their following joint project, which Boyce also wrote. A Cock and Bull Story (2005) imagines the tribulations of a harassed director (Jeremy Northam) trying to adapt Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy into a film. Coogan plays Tristram, his father Walter and, perhaps most memorably, himself. The movie’s conceptual games with Sterne’s text are fun, but it really sings as behind-the-scenes mockumentary, digging down into the status anxiety of a star player who’s not firmly bankable.

No one would disagree that all Coogan’s creations have a fair chunk of Coogan in them, but this was the first portrait that really made hay with his potential failure as Steve Coogan, rather than someone else. In Rob Brydon, he also had a scene partner to die for, and their squabbling banter is rarely short of priceless.

Take the opening scene: they’re in make-up, sharing a trailer, discussing the off-white of Brydon’s teeth. “I don’t want to get bogged down with the leading-man thing anyway,” says Brydon, trying to argue his character is a “co-lead”. “I think you can sleep easy at night,” Coogan replies, with a smug little smirk. And the co-lead thing? “Well, we’ll see after the edit, shall we?”

The competitive dynamic of an insecure star and a sidekick potentially getting even more laughs is the absolute meat of the movie, teasing out its wittiest conceits about the paralysis of wealth and success.

Steve Coogan with Michael Winterbottom

The on-screen Coogan/Brydon double act was far from running its course, since they’d reprise it in Winterbottom’s The Trip, his six-part, largely improvised 2010 sitcom for the BBC, which was converted into a feature for international viewers. Once again, the lines between reality and fiction were blurred: it is conceivable that Steve Coogan might be commissioned by the Observer, as the series posits, to do a reviewing tour of England’s finest country restaurants. Because his girlfriend backs out, Brydon gets the call to accompany him, and so it is that they find themselves doing duelling Michael Caine impressions over their scallops.

Winterbottom’s movies aim for spontaneity, and tend to sound improvised even when they’re not, but his work reaches an apex of looseness in The Trip, thanks to the spark and timing of two great comedians set at each other’s throats. Brydon’s superior impressions unleash all of Coogan’s most anxious bursts of oneupmanship, and he’s obnoxiously desperate to make his seniority clear. We’ve had Alan Partridge’s midlife crisis on Radio Norwich and beyond — this is Coogan’s, up a hill in the Dales, failing to get a mobile signal to reach anyone who might care. When a local woman recognises Brydon but not him, he’s crushed.

Coogan and Brydon aren’t the real-life pals you might assume from this series — they hadn’t seen each other for two years before shooting it. So it was really Winterbottom’s stroke of inspiration to bring them together, and use each to reveal aspects of the other: in Coogan’s case, vanity, crabbiness, and resentment that he might forever be associated with his biggest small-screen success, a prisoner of Partridge. His 2009 show Steve Coogan Live: As Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters puts this most bluntly, but the Winterbottom-backed character of Steve Coogan himself is beginning to run Partridge a close second.

Coogan has talked about how he values Winterbottom’s shooting methods — small sets, tight crews, and flexible scripts, presumably in contrast to the factory conditions of something like Around the World in Eighty Days, the 2004 family mega-flop in which he played Phileas Fogg. You wouldn’t say that Coogan relaxes into being himself in a more intimate, low-budget context, because an unease with himself is precisely what Winterbottom wants from him: a kind of stricken self-awareness.

Together — and it seems unlikely The Look of Love will end this fruitful partnership — the pair have committed themselves to comedies of the overgrown ego, variations on a puffed-up star persona that knows exactly how and where to puncture itself.